SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) provide operators with a graphical user interface needed to monitor and control, for instance, the production process in an industrial plant. They can be used to monitor and control a plant or equipment in industries such as water and waste control, oil and gas refining, pulp and paper etc. A SCADA system collects the status and any other information from the plant/equipment and presents them to the operator through a computer screen with a graphic user interface known as the Human Machine Interface (HMI).
However, since no one factory or plant is identical to another in terms of layout or architecture, every SCADA system will be unique to the particular factory or plant. Therefore, the Human Machine Interface (HMI) for each SCADA system will need to be configured and constructed accordingly to suit the needs of each factory/plant. System Integration (SI) engineers are usually responsible to integrate a SCADA system into either a factory/plant or a machine. Every piece of machinery or controls or gauges controlled and monitored by the SCADA system will appear as an object on the HMI. Colored graphics are used on the HMI to make them readily understandable.
The use of bitmap graphics for HMI has been known to be problematic due to the extensive amount of work required to program and/or customize them for different factories/plants. The work required to animate and customize bitmap graphics includes: creating and coloring the individual animation frames and editing frame by frame any necessary changes to each frame of an animation for customization. Also, bitmap graphics, and especially animated bitmap graphics, tend to have large file sizes and so require considerable computer memory for storage. Even the highly compressed animated GIF files with limited color palettes (from 2 colors to 256 colors) tend to be very big, especially when the objects they are representing have high on-screen pixel counts. Loading and/or animating bitmap graphics therefore tends to be very slow, and animating them tends to drain a lot of processor power from the CPU, slowing down computers with limited processing power.
Vector graphics, by comparison, can be handled and manipulated much more easily. Since the shapes and colors of the objects or texts defined under vector graphics are determined by a few bytes of computer codes, they can be changed with just a few keystrokes, and the objects displayed on the HMI can be animated easily with the insertion of a few instruction codes into the vector graphics files. Also, since vector graphic files are really small, they tend to load very fast, and require a lot less computing power from the CPU for animation.
However, in the conventional handling of vector graphic animation work or scripting, a programmer often needs to write from scratch, a script according to the animation desired. For example, a color animation (change of color) would require a programmer to draw a vector graphic object, followed by a script that searches for the graphic element by recognizing its Identity (ID) or Name, and then finally change its “filled” property to the desired color. Therefore, the conventional way to animate vector graphics requires extensive knowledge and experience in the manipulation of Document Object Model (DOM) objects or Extensive Markup Language (XML) format.
As use herein, the term “animation” refers to any change in the appearance of a displayed object, and so includes changes in such features as color, opacity, position, size, motion, orientation, or any combination of feature such as these. So, there is not necessarily movement on the screen.